I’ve been spending quite some time the past days digging around in old code (3+ years old with no or very little changes). It’s quite fun noticing what efforts pay off and which doesn’t when you go back to make chance to old stuff. I’m sure my observations aren’t generally applicable. We’re web developers and [...]
Archive for category Development
Code archeology
Oct 28
I recently had a little fun playing with the dynamic cache available in the Zend Platform. The Zend Platform is a commercial product, which provides a number of cool professional features to a PHP setup – one of these is the option to do dynamic caching. With dynamic caching you can cache the output of [...]
In programming languages common tasks should be easy, and surprisingly often I find my self loading data from some source file into a database. With PHP loading a CSV file into the database – or posting the data to an API – is quite easy. The only trick is to know the functions file_get_contents, split [...]
If you have a php array, but need to nuke an item from it, the unset function is just the tool to do that. When iterating through the array after removing the item, you should be slightly careful. The unset function does remove the item, but it doesn’t “reindex” the array, so you should traverse [...]
PHP4 – Game over
Aug 8
Yesterday PHP 4.4.9 was released, and today PHP 4 is officially dead. There wil be no more updates. Don’t worry too much tough. PHP 5 is far superior and there’s absolutely no go reason not to have moved on to PHP 5 long ago. PHP 4 – It was a nice ride and I’m sure [...]
Cookie limits in browsers
Jul 17
How many cookies do you neeed and how many does the browsers support? – It seem to come up all to often, so after a bit of digging in search engines, here are (for my own convenience) the findings of what the limits are on cookies in the currently used browsers. The cookie standard (RFC2965) [...]
It seems many developers get stuck in the same systems maintaining the same code for years and years. While it may be a common phenomenon there are a few things you can do as a developer to avoid being trapped in your own code forever. First make things readable. While your brain may be wired [...]
ZendStudio for Eclipse
May 28
For professional PHP development, nothing beats ZendStudio in my book. Currently ZendStudio is in the process of moving from a standalone application to something build on top of Eclipse. I’m sure it might be a wise move on the long term, but there are a few things bugging me with th current version. The number [...]
Simple Webpage Slideshow
May 18
At work we produce a few websites and have a few “web dashboards”. Wouldn’t it be nice, if public screens around the office could play a little loop mixing the websites and the dashboards together in a slideshow loop? After an hour of javascript debugging, a nice little generic webpage slideshow was put together, and [...]
PHP4 RIP
May 9
In less than 3 months – on August 8th, 2008 – PHP4 reaches end of life. If you still haven’t updated, it’s damn well time to get migration started. PHP5 far better than the previous versions, and if it’s good enough for Yahoo, Facebook and many other huge sites, it’ll probably be a joyride for [...]